Toyota to research artificial intelligence with US universities

SILICON VALLEY – Toyota Motor will team with two US universities on artificial intelligence research, adding to a growing number of industry-academic partnerships designed to speed next-generation product development.The Japanese automaker will put around $50 million over the next five years into research partnerships with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University in California. Centres for collaborative research will be established at each school. Research will focus on object recognition, detailed situational analysis and other topics, with results to be applied in the company’s automobiles and robots.Gill Pratt, who was the brains behind a contest by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency aimed at spurring development of emergency-response robots, will also contribute to the project.The research collaboration comes as Toyota seeks to boost investment in robotics and automated…